Manufacturing has begun, but delivery is slightly delayed

Manufacturing has begun, but delivery is slightly delayed

In our true style, it’s time for our monthly update! We have a bit of good news, and one bad bit. Let’s start with the bad news to get over with it quickly.

A 2 month delay is introduced, thanks to international banking issues

One would think that orchestrating a successful crowdfunding campaign would be the hard part, and transferring money would be a walk in the park. Usually, this is the case, but apparently sometimes it’s the other way around.

We initiated the first transfer back in January, expecting it to go smoothly and quickly. Boy, nobody could foresee what was about to happen! Fast forward two months and several transfer attempts, and some finally made it through. Now our cash flow is back to normal, But we’ve all got a few more gray hairs.

We don’t want to go into details this time, and rather wouldn’t name call anybody, because it’s not totally clear yet who’s fault this incident was. But you can be sure that as soon as we figure it out, we’ll publish a writeup about all the details. Because no startup – and its backers – should be ever put into such a situation!

Admittedly, this changes the delivery date from July 2016 to September 2016. We’re very sorry, and apologize for this extra delay. We want to assure you that everything is back to normal, and the project is on track. You can always expect us to be honest, and upfront regarding project happenings, even if things don’t go exactly as planned.

Onto the good news!

Manufacturing has begun

Now that our cash flow is back to normal, we transferred the prepayment fee to the mold making company, and they put things into motion. They are starting off with the sheet metal cutting die, which will cut the steel plates for the UHK on which the key switches reside.

András is in direct contact with the mold making firm, and knows them personally. This, and the fact that everyone is so concerned about the details gives us great confidence that things will go very smoothly.

The preparation of the tooling will take some time, but eventually raw metal will take shape, and we’re looking forward to share our adventure with you as it unfolds.

The configuration serializer of Agent

As far as I know, the configuration of the UHK is the most complex of any keyboard ever created. It features hundreds to thousands of objects of various types, arranged into a deep hierarchy, serialized across various representations that suit different scenarios.

That’s why it’s important to develop a robust, and extensible configuration serializer to deal with this complexity. I’ve laid the groundwork of the serializer, and it’s already able to serialize a subtree of the configuration. But given my myriad of responsibilities I won’t be the one who will finish it, which brings us the our next point.

Our team is growing!

We’re glad to announce that a new developer has joined to our team, so let him introduce himself:

Hello Everyone!

My name is József Farkas. I graduated from the University of Szeged last year as a Computer Scientist. Currently, I work at CAS Software Ltd. in the research/web team. I’m interested in Angular 2, ReactJS and TypeScript. But I’m also a big fan of C++.

I joined the UHK team last week and I’m working part-time on Agent, porting it to Angular 2, and implementing further features.

Józsi is a left-brain dominant person, who’s especially good at writing solid application logic. Árpi however is a right-brainer who excels at creative thinking, and designing UI and UX. I think they complement each other perfectly and I’m super excited to have them on board!

Beyond 300K

Since our previous update, total campaign funding passed $300K. As a matter of fact, it’s at $309,640K right now. Thank you so much for your continued support!

Increase your productivity by never leaving the home row.
Improve your posture by typing on two, separate keyboard halves.
Remap keys in any way you want. Experience how a keyboard can be different, yet familiar.

I see in your configuration example you apparently will be able to configure a key to be dual action, and I infer from the syntax one action for a key stroke and another for holding the key down. If so, will we be able to configure the Mouse key to be Esc for keypresses and Mouse mode for holding? I use Caps Lock as escape on my current keyboards and I've grown quite used to that, and not having that will be quite an adjustment when I get my keyboard.

Hi Travis, It's indeed perfectly possible to configure the UHK the way you suggested. Dual role keys for the win! Thank you for your understanding regarding the delay. We're also looking forward to September.

Thanks for the update! Hopefully this has nothing to do with the bank trying to hide from the Panama-papers and just totally forgot to transfer the money ;-) Luckily I still have another keyboard :-) and I hope that the two months delay also give you a little more time to stabilize the hardware and software. As a mechanical engineer myself I know that creating molds is hard and it never goes like intended.

Looking at the agent source-code on github I see you are using Handlebars for templating. Ever thought of using EmberJS (www.emberjs.com) created by the authors of Handlebars?

Our (old) bank is not hiding from anybody. They are simply hopeless beyond words. :)

You're right that in some ways this delay is a good thing. We'll definitely make a good use of the extra time.

Handlebars was only used by Arpi to prototype the UI, and it will be removed. We could use any JavaScript MVC framework, like Ember, React, or pretty much anything to make Agent work, but I have great confidence in Angular. The Angular 2 port is already in progress.

Hi László, could you please update your profile picture so that we can see those gray hairs? :) Unfortunate as I was really really stoked that July was coming closer and closer but things happen. Stay strong and build the best keyboard out there. Looking forward to September! Go go go!

Laszlo & team, fantastic prototyping and cheering on your to-production efforts (as i have one on order!). So I dread to suggest, as i dont really think other fundamental design choices should be made anymore (mcu & firmware)… but have you considered basing your mcu & firmware off existing open source work: eg GH60, TMK, kiibohd. The latter in particular, on which the 'symmetrical' usbc-connected inifinity ergodox is based on; quite akin to split design of uhk.

Other firmwares don't work for us for a couple of reasons. The modular architecture of the UHK is one of a kind, and it calls for a considerably more sophisticated firmware than the existing offerings. Also, the UHK stores its configuration in the EEPROM instead of compiling it into the firmware like other Open Source firmwares. This is yet another big difference that has a number of advantages.

So to sum it up, we're aware of the related projects and use them as much as possible, but given our design constraints our options are rather limited, and we inevitably need to build a lot of stuff from the ground up.